By Chidi Odinkalu
Having gone to London to watch the crowning of England’s King Charles III earlier this month, a friend joked last week, that President Muhammadu Buhari extended his stay so his dentist could crown his teeth. That was how he read the line from the Presidency that Buhari had stayed back in London for a dental procedure.
Ten days before the end of his presidency, on his return to Nigeria, Buhari commissioned the Presidential Wing of the State House Medical Centre, SHMC. Estimated to be worth N21 billion, this project provides an insight into the mindsets of Nigeria’s higher-ups.
By 2020, the SHMC was
reputed to cater for over 32,000 people annually but in reality, it was
anything other than what its name suggested. Originally established to “provide
healthcare services to the president, vice president, their families, as well
as members of staff of the Presidential Villa”, the clinic became the place
where the lowly servants of the rich and powerful rulers of Nigeria in Abuja go
to mercifully receive analgesics for their aches and pains.
When they died, their families sometimes chose to relieve their pain by
announcing that the bodies of their loved ones have been deposited in or moved
from the temporary morgue at the Clinic. For the most part, many believed – not
without good reason – that the role of the Clinic was to hasten the passage of
those who used it to the mortuary.
Yet, this Clinic was one of the
better funded medical units in the country. In the four years preceding 2020,
it reportedly received average annual appropriations of over N2.5 billion or a
cumulative appropriation of over N10 billion. However, the president and his
family and staff for whom it was designed were more comfortable getting their
medical needs fulfilled outside Nigeria.
No one will ever fully know how
much time President Buhari spent with doctors during his eight years in the
presidential villa. By November 2022, one count reported that he had spent at
least 237 days of his presidency with doctors outside the country. By the penultimate
week of his presidency, the count was 250. These numbers are floors not the
ceilings. Tired of the public carping from disaffected Nigerians about his
hypocrisy on medical tourism, it seems certain that Buhari’s handlers
occasionally dressed up his medical jaunts overseas in a bodyguard of
misrepresentation.
Underlying this approach to
their management of the relationship between the president and the country was
the philosophy, laid bare by Garba Shehu speaking for the Presidency in April
2019, that the president “can rule from anywhere in the world”. One decade
earlier, in the middle of December 2009, then Attorney-General of the
Federation, Michael Aondoakaa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, first claimed
this prerogative of a presidency-at-large on behalf of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua,
whom, we now know, was battling for his life at the time and probably lacked
any awareness that his presidency was in the hands of unknown persons. It is
entirely coincidental that Yar’Adua and Buhari were military mates who come
from the same Local Government Area in Katsina State.
In the period since Aondoakaa
made that claim, Nigeria appears to have evolved a brew of sovereign mendacity
in the service of state capture as a unique doctrine of state-craft.
In the week that Buhari was busy
attending to his mandibles in London, his chosen successor was reportedly busy
in Paris attracting foreign investors to Nigeria. In the period since the
Professor of History at the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, announced
the person he would prefer as Nigeria’s next president, the designated
successor has mostly been overseas.
Twenty days after the
announcement of the result of the presidential election, he flew out of Nigeria
on March 21 supposedly to perform the Lesser Hajj in the Muslim Holy Lands,
returning 35 days later on April 24. Sixteen days thereafter, on May 10, he
left again, this time it was said, to “woo investors” to Nigeria for 10 days.
It goes without saying that for many people, this claim tasked credulity. For
every day he has spent in the country since being announced as Nigeria’s next
president, President Buhari’s chosen successor has spent at least one and a
half days outside.
Understandably keen to inoculate
his principal against what could be read as a familiar pattern of a ghost
presidency, his spokesperson, BayoOnanuga, explained that he travelled only to
avoid pressure and distraction, reminding us, however, that “even if he is in
Russia, he can hold zoom meetings and do all kinds of things”.
Even before the onset of the
next presidential term, therefore, it has become quite clear that the travel
calendar of Nigeria’s next president will be a site of intense scrutiny.
Perhaps, anticipating this, President Buhari has sought to buffer his successor
by equipping this new VIP wing of the State House Medical Clinic. Conveniently
unaware of her own record of medical tourism, Buhari’s wife, Aisha, has been
quite voluble in taking credit for this project. Sadly, it seems quite clear
that neither President Buhari nor his partner “in the other room” have learnt
anything from his peers in other parts of Africa nor from their years as avid
medical tourists.
When former presidential
spokesperson, Reuben Abati, wrote in 2016 about becoming “convinced that there
must be something supernatural about power and closeness to it”, it became a
subject of much mirth and laughter with even Buhari’s own spokesperson laying
the boot too. But after seeing one African president fart his way through the
halls of a major international conference in Washington DC, and another
extensively urinate on himself while officiating a public event in Juba, it is
not hard to see how or why any presidency could be clothed in wonderment about
the wild and weird.
Fantastical tales and theories
about the well-being of presidents are as old as power in and beyond Africa.
Courtiers exist to spin those yarns. When he toppled President Ben Bella in
1965, Algeria’s famed guerilla leader, Houari Boumédiène, was a dashing
33-year-old. By early 1978, his public appearances became occasional and then
rare. Diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, Algerians were massaged with all
manner of stories while their president received medical attention in Moscow.
In November 1978, he disappeared from public view, eventually dying on December
27, 1978 after 39 days in coma.
While he received medical
attention in Belgium for a terminal condition for most of 2012, the public
disposition of the government he led was that then Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi,
was in either robust health or suffering from a routine infection.
In October 2018, Gabon’s
president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, suffered a stroke while travelling in Saudi
Arabia. One month later, he was transferred to Morocco to continue his recovery
and rehabilitation, staying there until mid-2019. Back home in Libreville, the
public and Gabon’s institutions got tired of a steady supply of misinformation,
which triggered a coup attempt. After some 10 months out of public view, a
barely recognisable Ali Bongo finally made a public appearance in August
2019.
The people who spin these fables
have an interest in the well-being of the state or indeed of the occupant of
the office but in their benefits from propinquity to him, which must be
preserved at all costs. The two most effective ways to do this are to
misrepresent the facts or to hide the evidence. Many people may not know it but
as powerful as they may seem, presidents are often glorified prisoners. In this
new VIP wing of the SHMC, President Buhari has chosen to invest in a glorified
prison as his preferred legacy for his successor.
When they arrive in less than a
fortnight, those whose livelihoods depend on this successor may decide that
using that facility does not fully conduce to the goal of misrepresenting the
facts or concealing the evidence. Goodluck Jonathan was the Facebook president;
Buhari is the medical tourism president. Nigeria may be about to transition to
an encounter with the Zoom president.
*A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
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